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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Well, if the customer with the expired payment information is still using and valuing the service, he will soon realize that he needs to update his payment information without any outside intervention or he will lose access to the service. If the user no longer cares about the service and just forgot to cancel or was to lazy to do so, why not just let him go instead of continuing to sell him something he does no longer need?

UPDATE: I probably got the wrong first impression - I thought the service was kind of last resort if the user did not respond to the normal notifications that he will lose his service; I missed that you can completely outsource this.

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Because that is not how people work. We forget things. Today I got a reminder that one of my hosting accounts expired. I happily put down the $90 for the account and even sent an email to my contact there, because loosing that account would be a major headache for me. I need that account, I just didn't remember to update my CC

Same here.. Once let our DNS provider subscription lapse (yearly renewal). Luckily discovered it about a week before the grace period ended.

Think about a system that gives you, as a customer, piece of mind, but doesn't actively intrude on your life. For example, something like Pingdom. They tell you about problems with your systems but don't actively tell you anything if nothing is going wrong.

Let's assume you're happy not thinking about Pingdom when nothing is going wrong, and happy with their service when something does happen. Would you appreciate Pingdom silently ending your service when your credit card expires? Would you consider that good customer service? If they do contact you, would you consider it "sales" to get a gentle reminder?

Some apps are like that.

There was this analytics tool called get.gaug.es that i really liked looking at for $6/month. In addition to my existing mission critical analytics apps like mixpanel and google analytics.

I would never have cancelled guag.es but since my credit card switched, i just didn't like it enough to be bothered to update it. A phone call is probably the only thing that would have gotten me to update it. Probably not, but it increases the odds from 0% to greater than 0%

Couldn't disagree more. I've forgotten these things all the time and actually appreciate a reminder from the service that I need to do something about it. It's so much easier than keeping track of what's stored where and updating it

We have no less that 60 different web services that we use in our business. The last thing I need to have happen is for one of my apps to stop working. Send me an email and tell me somethings wrong.

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